So Sad to Fall in Battle By Kumiko Kakehashi (Translated by Giles Murray) Review by Henry Hilton We re living in caves in a barren wilderness. This was already the reality for Japanese Imperial forces digging underground bunkers on a treeless speck in the Pacific prior to the battle for Iwo Jima. But once the U.
S. Marines landed on Feb 19, 1945, the scene was transformed into a living hell which completely surpasses imagination. It quickly became a world of night actions, grenade attacks on tanks and bitter hand-to-hand fighting that led to extraordinary bravery on both sides.
In the face of stubborn Japanese resistance, it took weeks before the eventual capture of what Admiral Nimitz would later define as the Pacific s most impregnable eight-square-mile island base could be achieved. Kumiko Kakehashi does not pretend to be a military historian. Instead, she has had the novel idea of deploying letters written by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the man in charge of the defense of Iwo Jima, to present a more human perspective.
It was Kuribayashi s thankless task to prepare his forces to ward off a near-certainU.S. assault on Iwo Jima, the supposedly strategic aircraft carrier, that represented one more critical station on the American road to Tokyo.
Kakehashi s book provided the basis for Clint Eastwood s recent movie Letters from Iwo Jima. It is a determined effort to place the battle for Iwo Jima in a purely Japanese context through use of correspondence, interviews with veterans and relatives of the deceased and by joining in pilgrimages to the isolated, off-limits, volcanic island. So Sad to Fall in Battle is a bit of a mixed grill.
It gives us brief biographies of Kuribayashi and his wife, who would live on to the ripe old age of 99, the fighting for famed Mount Suribachi and the slow U.S. progress up the island.
It is also an attempt to ask whether the top brass sitting happily back at Imperial General Headquarters really knew what they were doing. It will come as no surprise to learn that Kakehashi reckons that the staff in Tokyo had almost written off Iwo Jima prior to the start of the battle. She claims that they did not even try to find out how the war was really progressing, but just drew lines on a map and declared: Such-and-such place must be defended to the death.
A whole generation of Brits used to make exactly the same comment about their generals and the apparent mindless direction of the first world war in Flanders. The result is to leave Kuribayashi as the clear hero of the text. His leadership against impossible odds does indeed deserve enormous praise but it remains the nature of total war that some may well be called upon to fight to the last in the hope of delaying the enemy.
It may be relevant to note that the Japanese government right up to August 1945 appears to have coldly reckoned with mighty few misgivings that massive civilian casualties from American air raids would just have to be accepted. The Japanese military deaths on Iwo Jima were many times fewer than the extraordinary toll resulting from the bombing of entire areas of downtown Tokyo in the spring of 1945. The irony is that Kuribayashi appears to have told himself that if his forces were instructed to sell their lives dearly rather than going for a frontal banzai charge, then it might yet prevent the destruction of Japan s cities.
So Sad to Fall in Battle cannot be expected to answer all concerns over Iwo Jima. What it may do is to prompt thoughts not only about responsibility for vast carnage but ask the still broader question of why the Pacific War started in the first place.
News RSS